The Silenced Nightingale
by fabricated fantasies
Summary: They label her a survivor, but Lavender isn't sure if surviving this war isn't worse than dying because of it.


**a/n **for Lovisa, with all my love.

Written for the Hogwarts Games 2012 (Cycling - Track), and the Minor Character Bootcamp (brave). Part four of the _futility_ series.

warnings: blood, graphic descriptions of violence (not self-harm)

* * *

The werewolf leans over her, his half-transformed paws digging into her shoulders, tearing at the thin threads holding her shirt together. A leer crosses his face, already stained here and there with red blood, and he takes one hand off her shoulder, using his other hand to keep her pressed to the ground underneath him. He drags a sharp, filthy nail down her pale cheek, and she shudders, feeling dirty and exposed at his touch.

Sharp pain burns in her shoulders as he braces himself against her, pointed nails like kitchen knives marking her body and making her bleed. Dark figures dance across her vision as he pushes down and smack her head onto the hard flooring of the Great Hall, and it feels like she's drifting away, her soul disconnecting from a body she once called beautiful.

She chokes out a sound as his claws rake sideways across her throat and tear into the skin, spilling scarlet blood across the stone floor. Her heart beats too fast, dancing to the pace of her breaths like a small child who has never learnt to count. She can feel her throat burn every time she sucks in air, and this will be her last day on earth, she is sure of it. She doesn't feel brave anymore.

He growls in her ear, low and dark and full of sinister promises, and as she closes her eyes she hopes that she won't see any of her friends in the afterlife, if there is one.

* * *

She opens her eyes to pale coloured walls that hurt to look at for too long, pristine shades of white that only serve to make her want to splash paint over them. Her chest feels heavy, her shoulder aching in the same rhythm as the burning in her throat, and as she tries to raise her hands to feel whatever it is that holds her down she finds that her limbs refuse to move.

"Lavender?" an unfamiliar voice asks, a figure wearing the ugliest lab coat she has ever seen wandering into her vision. The uniform reminds her of Halloween and cold nights, dressing up and playing doctor with Seamus in the dungeons. She follows the Healer's gaze down to her chest, tracing the barely healed slashes with her eyes, and she knows that there will be no more heated kisses for her.

She lies there in her hospital bed, unable to speak and ignoring those who speak to her, occupied with watching the scars that trail down her arms and shoulders like large dark spiders crawling over her skin, decorating her body where wounds shouldn't be.

She isn't beautiful any longer - she will never be the centre of attention again, the perfect beauty whose smiles are worth more than gold, with eyes like pale flowers and that one freckle sitting daintily on her left shoulder.

* * *

Old friends and acquaintances come and go, casting weary looks up and down her ravaged body, guilt reverberating in every fibre of their beings as if they could have saved her. As if, had they been there, it wouldn't take so much effort for her to smile and carry on conversations without darkness hiding in her expression. She hates their visits, sending them away as quickly as possible, because she did not ask for them to be there, and what right to they have to pity her?

"You were so _brave_," they tell her, holding her pale hands with both of theirs and gazing into her eyes as if it will force her to accept their sincerity. She doesn't speak - she can't, and she sees their eyes flicker down to her scarred throat with saddened eyes after every silence in which she once would have spoken. The loss of her voice hurts more than the loss of her beauty, because for a girl who loved nothing more than to talk about anything and everything the sun touched, this imposed silence is a greater punishment than hell.

"I love you," they promise, and it doesn't elicit the same heady feeling that it used to, back when she was the queen of the spotlight and all she wanted was for someone to adore her. The words don't mean anything anymore, not when she is paralysed, a princess frozen in time, with every moment the same as the last. Words mean nothing when she cannot say them, when the only person she imagines would understand her without speech never comes to her bedside. Parvati stays away, and she tries not to think about why.

"Feel better soon," they add, creeping towards the door with yet another guilty glance. Their voices blur together more and more as the days pass, Bill Weasley's low tones blending with those of his wife, Seamus' voice losing the accent she loved so much as it melts into Hermione's stilted silence.

Time passes her by and leaves her be, unlike the floods of visitors she doesn't want to see, and she wants to scream at the monotony of it all, like hearing her own voice will take away the pain and the dullness and the feeling of being oh so completely _lost_.

* * *

"She may never speak again," the doctors tell her mother when she arrives, and it is the worst day of Lavender's life.

* * *

_You're a survivor_, the world tells her as she sleeps alone, her skin painted with cuts and bruises that refuse to fully heal over. She cannot speak, can't move without pain flaring up and opening up barely healed scars, can't put on a dress and heels and move on with her life like the rest of her friends are slowly learning to do, but at least she survived, and that's a tragedy in itself.

_We won_, it says, but she's best friends with a hospital bed and a disgustingly scented ointment, the faces of the dead living on the backs of her eyelids, and it doesn't feel like a victory at all.

* * *

**a/nII **Please review! :)


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